Tukul dismissed his initial fears after finding out that the ‘mysterious woman’ was simply one of those Caucasians. He had seen them wandering the place, asking anyone they came across various questions in some sort of hesitant groans. This one was a woman with long blonde hair, a big backpack and a pair of sunglasses on her big forehead. She was also dressed indecently, with a tight-fitting shirt (he noticed her large bosom) and short pants. Why is a blonde western female tourist 'mysterious' without giving us something mysterious she is doing. She noticed A lot of noticing going on here - some more lechery here by the protagonist would be juicy - More Bosoms and Leering At Bosoms! We Demand It! him and walked to his cart.

She looked at the cart and then to Tukul. “These… are meatballs?” she asked.I'm confused on the language in this piece. She is speaking Malay? But doesn't understand his Malay? But then does understand what he says after not understanding it?

She reached into her pockets and pulled out some wrinkled notes. She gave him enough for at least five bowls. He smiled and took them all. “Do you want it spicy?” She blinked at him again. Tukul let out his tongue and exhaled rapidly, swinging his hands in front of his mouth. The girl stared at him and backed away slightly. ADVERB ALERT

Of course she didn’t knew! what this mean!!, Tukul thought. He showed her a bottle of chilli. “Do you want the meatballs with this?” Proof read

“What’s this?”

“It makes this feel hot,” Tukul said, pointing to his I was hoping this sentence was heading somewhere else tongue. He put his thumbs up. “Delicious.”

“Ah! Okay then,” she said. Her backpack had disappeared.

A Few minutes later, Tukul finished makinghow was he making them? Describe sounds, smells etc this is a great chance to bring the authentic food cart experience to the reader his meatballs. He also added a generous helping of chilli. He put in fewer meatballs than usual. He handed the bowl to her. “Be careful, it’s hot.”I'm all for short sentences, but you've got 4 here doing the job of one or two. 'Tukul took the meatballs off the grill, still sizzling from the acrid coalfire. He added (less than a full serve) to the soup with (more than a full helping) of chilli. Be careful, it's hot' he said, passing it over.

Without hesitation, she grabbed the bowl and put her fingers in. She licked her lips as her white fingers picked up a meatball. It went inside her mouth. She swallowed them, without chewing. She smiled. “This is quite good.”

“Well, of course! I'm Mang Tukul, the best in town!”I think this is the only thing we learn about Tukul

She continued ‘eating’.I am still 'reading' and 'critiquing' She then bowed her head to suck on the soup. As she raised her head, she ignored the strands of blonde hair now blocking her face. “So proud of that, when you lived in a town of this size.”

“You speak well,” Tukul said. He began to pull his cart away.

She finished drinking up everything. She then dropped the bowl. “Well, of course. I’ve lived here. For sooo many years. Don’t tell me you don’t know me, Mang Tukul?”

Tukul felt his senses weakening.I don't know what this means The woman in front of him put her hands on the cart and leaned over. He couldn’t help but look at the woman’s chest. She then put her hands on the hem of her shirt and pulled it up. Tukul tried to cover his eyes, but he still stared at her.

As she lifted her shirt slowly, Tukul saw her white skin slowly turning darker and a faint trace of blood running down her bellybutton. As Tukul looked up, he saw that she didn’t have a stomach. Instead, there was a big hole, with bits of bone and organs peeking out of its side, as if someone took a big chunk out of her stomach. Tukul fell down on his bottom as the white foreigner in front of him turned darker and its body extended up, her shirt replaced with a long, white bloody gown.Is this some kind of pocong?

“But…what?” Tukul said.

The thing’s appendages shot out and grabbed Tukul’s shoulders, pinning him to the ground. It bent forward and moved its head closer to Tukul’s. Tukul shivered, staring into those bloodshot eyes. “I’ve been outside, of course,” it said. “Do you know what…spirits do out there? Out there, on the land of the whites?”

Tukul couldn’t process what happened to her face. It shook, it buzzed, it cracked. All he sensed next was darkness and a faint whiff of spicy meatballs.

“They killed people.”

Overall not too bad, I felt like I was reading a trashy Thai horror flick - so that's good! But if that's where it's going, needs to be hammed up. Maybe if there had been some more back story on why this happened to Tukul it would have fleshed it out a lot more and made it feel like a more complete story. Vengeful spirit, Capricious minor god. Whatever - you had another 1k words to play around with. Maybe submit closer to the deadline next time.

Because I missed hanging out in the Dome this week (), I am going to follow twinkle cave's lead and choose one, or perhaps even two, of you at random later and critique the poo poo out of your stories. Hooray for you!

In the meantime, here's a list of paying fiction markets from LitReactor. The article's author has included his thoughts on some of them. You may notice that the first group is horror publications. Each of you now has a horror story under your belt.

In my feedback, I'm going to give each of you a couple suggestions as to how to improve your stories. Listen or don't, whatever--just know that there isn't a single story in this round that is perfect and precious just the way it is. Make your stories better. Then send them out to some of these publications. Then, while you await rejection, make your stories even better. Repeat until you've published the fucker.

"It's video games, Scully."Video games?"
"He enlists the help of strangers to make his perfect video game. When he gets bored of an idea, he murders them and moves on to the next, learning nothing in the process.""Hmm... interesting."

I abhor my writing. I loathe seeing my words appear on the screen. Before, I thought my plots were askew, but having entered Thunderdome I feel like all these black zigzags in the end fuze into one big smear of something brown and putrid.

Without any elegance, intrigue or wit.

As is natural of things brown and putrid.

~My official auto-critique.

And I loving hate always having to look up words in a Russian-English dictionary.

I abhor my writing. I loathe seeing my words appear on the screen. Before, I thought my plots were askew, but having entered Thunderdome I feel like all these black zigzags in the end fuze into one big smear of something brown and putrid.

Without any elegance, intrigue or wit.

As is natural of things brown and putrid.

~My official auto-critique.

And I loving hate always having to look up words in a Russian-English dictionary.

Thanks. I feel much better now.

My critique of everything you do

One could, perchance, be convinced that your method of writing prefers to distract the potential elocutionist from the content through the deployment of advanced and somewhat antiquated vocabulary and grammar. The style is more reminiscent of administrative paperwork or other such hurdy-gurdy, when you should be attempting to cultivate an elegant, naturalistic prose style al la Ernest Miller Hemingway. "For Sale. Baby Shoes: never worn" is a superior line to "We are selling the shoes of an infant. They have at no juncture been worn."

"It's video games, Scully."Video games?"
"He enlists the help of strangers to make his perfect video game. When he gets bored of an idea, he murders them and moves on to the next, learning nothing in the process.""Hmm... interesting."

Look, are you all deliberately trying to confuse me? This is the most natural style for me. Or maybe I should check the dictionary. The definiton of "natural" just could change to "emulating Ernest Miller Hemmingway" overnight.

Look, are you all deliberately trying to confuse me? This is the most natural style for me. Or maybe I should check the dictionary. The definiton of "natural" just could change to "emulating Ernest Miller Hemmingway" overnight.

I'd say they're telling you to stop using the thesaurus so much and write a little simpler but don't quote me on that.

We wanted you people to make us dread to turn out the lights. I tried to share some of your stories with my four-year-old niece, but she wandered off to make an imaginary omelette. Pretend eggs were more gripping than your offerings this week. Let that sink in and feel very, very bad about yourselves.

Nevertheless, we had to choose a winner. It was not a simple decision. For managing to create an eerie ambiance in the Arizona sunshine, we choose Capntastic as the victor.

The loser slot, however, was an easy decision. JonasSalk: On your very first Thunderdome outing, you managed to bring shame upon your house and the houses of your neighbors. Wear your disgrace like an albatross.

Judges for next week are Capntastic, ESB, and SurreptitiousMuffin. They will not be as tolerant of your failures. Please them, and you may yet live.

I got it wrong. Look, I'm well aware I got it wrong and uh, I got it wrong.

I'm going to quote my own email on why I chose Cap for the winner:

quote:

I'll clarify why I chose Capntastic: it's maybe not quite the best story there but it's such a metric fuckton better than where he started out, that really needs to be rewarded. All the others in the leading pack have been strong contenders since pretty much the start, so I'm willing to give the Cap a few underdog points that edge him over the top. It's a pretty messy, close call otherwise.

I wasn't the only one who picked him for the winner though, so there's that. Congratulations Capn. I'm not sure if I can find the quote in the old thread but I believe there was an idea that if a former loser won, they could get a new avatar on the house to replace their losertar. We still going with that?

I got it wrong. Look, I'm well aware I got it wrong and uh, I got it wrong.

O Capn! My Capn! Your victory's near done,
The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize you sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting.

Because Capntastic is our first ever LOSER RESURGENT, I'm letting him make the call for all future LOSERS RESURGENT: do you want to choose your new avatar, or do you want there to be a Thunderdome WINNERTAR that all LOSERS RESURGENT are awarded? If you choose the latter, any preferences to the design? Any 'domer with design ideas, feel free to post them.

No idea what the hell is going on, here. (This will be a common theme to my critiques for this round.)

You've got a (what? private detective?) delivering a parcel to a Welsh village. The recipient of the parcel is a hermit. Who lives in a schoolhouse. Your detective knows this, but decides that he needs an introduction in order to deliver the parcel, so he enlists the help of a local innkeep. They get drunk and decide to open the package. It contains a thimble. They go looking for the schoolhouse, can't find it, and the detective pushes the thimble into his brain for reasons which aren't entirely clear. Afterwards, the hotelier wakes in hospital, reads an unenlightening letter, reads a newspaper clipping that somehow relates to what's just happened, discovers that the thimble is now on his finger, freaks the gently caress out, THE END.

First off, do whatever you need to do to get across the importance of the thimble--expand the story, tell it from a different angle; whatever. Likewise, I have no idea how Jones fits into this. Or why David doesn't just go up to the school, drop the package on the front step, and go the hell back home. You want your reader to care? They first need to know what's important and why.

Chairchucker -- "Hope You Guessed My Name"

Horror-comedy is difficult to pull off, but when it works, it works.

This piece doesn't work.

It's loose, for one thing. "A-ha! We have found a book on summoning demons! We shall therefore summon a demon! Whoops--you're dead! Now we're in a pub, where the local good-time girl tries to entice the demon into sex! But here's our nominal protagonist coming through the door! He's hosed! Now an old woman comes in and vanquishes the demon! She is a minister! But the survivors can't be bothered to go to her church! THE END."

Pick a character and follow them the whole way through. It'll at least give the piece a feeling of continuity.

If you're going to have Gloria kick arse for The Lord, introduce her earlier.

Etherwind -- "Nightmares"

Sleep paralysis has ruined a woman's life. She learns that it's not sleep paralysis after all, but rather some malevolent spirit that's attached itself to her neighbor.

Solid core concept. Hit-and-miss execution.

"The funeral is tonight!" -- No, it isn't. The wake or viewing might be, but putting people in the ground at night just ain't done in upstate New York. At least, not in cemeteries.

"Let's go antiquing!"
"But I have to write a story!"
"Let's do both!"
"OMG, the Amish are demons!"
"I die!"

"Instead of the bearded face Ben was expecting, there was the face of a leering demon." -- No. Bad. "The face of a leering werewolf", "the face of a leering Frankenstein", "the face of a leering Creature from the Black Lagoon"; don't throw your hands up and say "it's a demon!" That's bullshit. Don't even write the word "demon". It only scares people who are frightened of those five letters placed in that exact order. It has no visceral impact. Tell your reader exactly why they should be terrified of this thing in the viewscreen.

[O]ne of the Mennonites had the face replaced with a horrible monster. -- see above.

“I’m going to loving kill you all.” -- Yeah, this is the reaction that will have readers' heads nodding. "I would so, like, get an axe? And scream at the demons? And then try to kill all the demons with the axe? Just like that?"

STONE OF MADNESS -- "A Threshing"

Is this a reform school? A mental hospital? Both? Give it a name and tell us straight-up what it is.

She glanced at the small object in his hand. It looked like he'd used his own hair. -- Shape? Meaning? Is it a cross, a Star of David, a stick figure, a phallus? Needs detail to have an impact.

Made it for you, Sarah.
To keep you safe, he'd said, but that didn't make sense, she didn't feel safe at all, and it was moving, it was unfurling towards her, knots and clumps and tangles -- is she being attacked by his hair offering?

Good characterization with Sarah. I just have no idea why she's in danger.

supermikhail -- "R.A.W. F.E.A.R"

What is going on, here? Some sort of phone-transmitted memetic virus turns ordinary people into deranged Puritans? I mean, that'd be an interesting concept, but you've placed the narration too close to the characters to explain it outside of dialogue, and explaining something like that in dialogue would just be ridiculous:

"Hello, main character(s)! I am Professor Snori Snorensson, and I know what's going on! I am an expert in memetic viruses, you see. And also pilgrims."

Except that it's the Second Coming. I which case... gently caress, I don't know. You really want your main character to be a guy whose only in-scene fundamentalist-level-picky sin is whacking it? I realize that you're flirting with comedy, here, but you either need to beef up the laughs or beef up the drama. As it is, it just kinda sits there.

Chexoid -- "Sunrise"

I like the concept--sort of a frontier take on Pitch Black. The low word-count limit caused you to over-compress, though. You need to flesh this out, give us characters to take an interest in. I want to know about Lauren and Tyler Bradley. I want to see the parishioners chuck the clergyman out into the dark (although if you're talking Apache, then you're talking the Southwest, where the Catholic population tended to be Mexican, so you might want to change Father Lyle to Reverend or Pastor Lyle).

I'm not getting the correlation between Elijah Cartwright and his biblical namesake; might want to either make it more obvious or let it go.

SC Bracer -- "Hello, Grandma"

"Oh, cool--setting a Stephen-King-esque horror story in India ought to be interesting..."
[reads]
"...Maybe not."

Couple things:

* No idea what you meant the reveal to be, but it reads like she has multiple personalities. So not supernatural.
* Natural dialogue is not natural--there is a running narrative in all of our heads; doubtless, in many cases, employing a 2:1 ratio of curse words to non-curse words. The running narrative is not interesting unless you edit the hell out of it. Dialogue where every fifth word is "gently caress" sounds like this.

Meis -- "Extracurricular Activities"

Might as well say this here: Unless you really know what you're doing, don't write horror in the first person, past tense. You would think that being inside your character's skin while they go through these experiences would tie the reader more closely to the terror you want them to feel, but here's the thing: If your narrator is telling the tale, the reader knows from the first sentence that they survived whatever is about to befall them, robbing your story of tension. If your narrator tells the tale but dies at the end, it's a cheat--how are they relaying the information? You might say, "A-ha! But what about epistolary stories?" Again, your narrator not only survived, but got far enough from danger to sit down and write an account.

On to the actual story:

Here's what you could've had: A surrealist nightmare about that terrible space between childhood and adulthood, combining body horror with that old standard of the subconscious, "Oh My God, I'm Still in School!"

Here's what you came up with: Thing-thing-other-thing-thing-thing-GULP

Your narrator doesn't know what a parent-teacher conference is called. She doesn't have the imagination to relate the horror of what's happening to her. She's too preoccupied with processing the last event to process the event which just occurred. Try rewriting it in third-person.

JonasSalk -- "740 Words"

I don't have the time to do this line-by-line, even though it needs it.

* Don't play around with time until you can tell a linear story.
* "But we are getting ahead of ourselves." is bullshit. Don't acknowledge the reader.
* “Alright, guys,” Shep said, not leaving his point on the door, “you may remember me from a little while before. I used to work here, but that was a front. I was casing this place, and now I’m robbing it.” -- said no armed robber, ever. "Ha! You only thought I was a mild-mannered burger-flipper, but in truth, I am a MASTER CRIMINAL!"
* “I am Legion,” Legion said. -- no. As much of a clusterfuck as the story was before the conclusion, at least you had the small redeeming concept of a town peopled with shape-shifting monsters. Then you bugger that up by announcing the entrance of a biblical demon.

monkeyboydc -- "Everything Under Rocks"

Perhaps this is a personal thing, but the third-person, present tense just isn't working here. “What did they can here?” Clark asks.--that flip in tense just fucks me up.

What the hell is going on with the ending? We've been in the Alaskan wilderness, now we're in a child's room, and there's vermin? If there was a set-up, I completely missed it.

BlackFrost -- "Home"

First-person again.

What I got out of this was that you were trying to tell a sorta-surreal tale about a guy who gets a voicemail from his mother, in which she tells him that she and his father are evacuating his childhood home... so he decides to go look for them in the one place he ought to know they will not be. Only the father isn't really a concern. He wants his mommy. And the house traps him.

There's just not a lot to go on, here. The character's Mom-obsession makes him sound more creepy than sympathetic. It just feels really blatantly Freudian.

Maybe a rewrite in third-person will give the reader enough distance from the character to get some perspective about what's going on.

toanoradian -- "Sundel Bolong Udah Jalan-Jalan"

Flesh this out. Let us see at least a few days in Tukul's life--what he struggles with, what he wants, how he interacts with his peers. A little foreshadowing would do wonders; a sense that he's being followed, some encounter that tips the reader that the Caucasian woman is not what she appears to be, some speculation or mention of the mythical creature (it sounds almost like a Filipino Manananggal, but with significant differences).

Unless the last line is an essential cultural tip-off to the nature of this critter, trim it.

Noah -- "Blood for Blood"

You were thisclose to getting the nod. What happened to the parents? How did the kids "bring it on [themselves]"? How old are Aaron and Tiffany? Because he sounds five and she sounds like an extremely pissed-off fifteen-year-old.

Answer those questions clearly and interestingly, and I'd say it's ready to shop it around.

Sitting Here -- "Mother's Day"

Another near-nod. NOTE TO NEWBS: Notice how the people who took every last second to submit turned in more solid results, on the whole? Whether it's because they took the extra time to polish their stories, or lingered over first-draft ideas, or scrapped everything and rewrote, or even if they didn't get around to it until the eleventh hour, but are just that badass--it's not a coincidence. Take as much goddamn time as you can get away with.

This story begs for third-person. The end reveal? Yeah, third-person. Rewrite and shop it.

Capntastic -- "Deep Sleep"

You've built this great, almost-Lynchian atmosphere, using clear language and just the right amount of detail. The weakness lies in the ending:

As he slept, in a state of almost content apathy, he never would consider that someone else was living off of his energy.

Fix. Flesh out the concept, give us the clues, show us the "someone"--anything. Make it pop, and it's ready to shop.

swaziloo -- "Dog Days"

Here's what I do when I see strings of seemingly-random words: I look for acrostics. (Blame Grant Morrison's run on Doom Patrol and his "Men from N.O.W.H.E.R.E.".) So when I saw:

Bloody ugly damaged goods.

I read:

Bloody ugly damaged goods.

"Bud-g"? You have some sort of message for me?

If the idea is "Rosemary's Baby, but with a schizophrenic", then it could use just a wee bit of expansion. If the random words are meant to be signs of possession, though, I'd suggest Greek, Aramaic, Sumerian--ancient languages that Kate wouldn't know.

Otherwise, it's solid. Another near-nod.

V for Vegas -- "Iakopo"

Again, it might be personal, but I'm not feeling the foul-mouthed kids in this tribal, traditional village.

Why does the only hit I'm getting for "Le Fe'e e! faafofoga mai ia" tell me that this is Samoan? Please don't tell me that you misread "Indonesia" as "Polynesia", or that you think they're in any way related.

It's not horror. It's more of a coming-of-age story, it seems to me.

As to the story on its own terms: Didn't get the end. "You have killed a man." But he didn't? Unless this is an actual SAMOAN ritual in which kids stab their elders and they just "ceremonially die", in which case that needs to be clarified.

All in all, though: pretty good. Clarify the end, ask yourself whether the cussing kids are necessary or an affectation, italicize Iakopo's thoughts rather than making them appear to be dialogue, and it ought to be good to go.

Everyone look at this scrub who's never been to a funeral at night. Pro-tip: cremations can happen at any hour.

Poll for Americans: If you were describing the disposition of someone's remains by fire, would you mentally separate any religious service performed before or during into "funeral" and "cremation"? Or would you refer to the whole thing as "Aunt Ethel's cremation"?

Maybe it's a regional thing to combine the two under the one umbrella term; I dunno. But yeah, putting someone with the last name "Williams" into the ground after dark isn't something that falls under the heading of "business as usual" in the heavily-Protestant area of upstate New York. My friends in the funeral parlor business have told me interesting facts about non-Western funerary customs, some of which may involve night burial. But as something that's just thrown into the mix, it just rang odd enough to point out.

So I got paranoid and ran it past some people I know in up-state NY and they all said it was cool, they didn't even think twice about it. That said, it's trivial enough that if it sticks out to more than one person I might as well change it.

So I got paranoid and ran it past some people I know in up-state NY and they all said it was cool, they didn't even think twice about it. That said, it's trivial enough that if it sticks out to more than one person I might as well change it.

Which bit? The cremation/funeral dichotomy, or the night burial? Asking for my own edification. Most of my remaining family migrated to upstate New York, three of them marrying natives whose families all use the blanket "cremation" and who haven't attended any night burials (unfortunately, the subject of funerals comes up quite a bit).

The general response was "If the funeral's at night, it must be a cremation." None of them really thought anything of there being a funeral at night, and all of them said they figured that meant cremation. The Catholic in the group said that he new it meant she wasn't Catholic, because no priest would hold the funeral mass at night.

It's like, I don't know what to tell you? Nobody seemed to think it was a thing.